The Center for Adolescent Literacies at UNC Charlotte

The Center for Adolescent Literacies at UNC Charlotte focuses on developing instruction to make literacy and learning relevant and effective for adolescents and those who work with them. The Center also conducts and supports research and service in support of its primary mission.

What we are doing...

The Scrabble Project website is a collaborative project of the Center for Adolescent Literacies with Charlotte Community Scholars Kierra Boyd and Katrina Buchanan, undergraduate teacher education majors at UNC Charlotte. The Scrabble Project website supports Communities in Schools of Charlotte-Mecklenburg's Scrabble Clubs launched during the 2014-15 school year by providing intructional support resources and evaluation tools for students and CIS staff.

The LESA Project website is a project supported by the Center. LESA, or La Escuelita de St. Alban, is a pre-school for bilingual English Language Learners. In the Summer 2015, graduate students enrolled in UNC Charlotte programs developed this website to support volunteers working with the children at La Escuelita.

The RWS Cyber Tutoring project is a collaboration that includes Communities in Schools (CIS), Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools (CMS) and the ReadWriteServe programs at UNC Charlotte. The goal of this program is to connect UNC Charlotte students to high school students at West Mecklenburg and West Charlotte High Schools to support students through online tutoring. RWS Cyber Tutors receive training and support from CIS and RWS and use technology to tutor students. In addition to weekly online tutoring sessions, tutors and students meet a few times for organized socials at the schools.

The Center is a partner in the Project 1,000, an effort led by the United Way of Central Carolinas to recruit 1,000 readers, tutors and mentors to work with children in our community. The Center is developing tutor/mentor/reader training, handbooks and the RWS Tutoring website. For more information to the Project 1,000 website. To date, more than 500 tutors, mentors and readers have attended RWS workshops.

The Center has collaborated with Charlotte area literacy organizations to form the Charlotte Mecklenburg Literacy Roundtable, a network of literacy providers in our community. This group had its first meeting on March 3, 2011 in the College of Education.

The ReadWriteServe tutoring programs including the America Reads at UNC Charlotte, Literacy PALS volunteer and other tutoring programs have placed over 1,800 volunteers as tutors with 3500 K-12 learners in North Carolina.

Literacy for Democracy works in economically disadvantaged communities to improve children and adolescents’ literacy and academic achievement through service learning with university pre-service and in-service teachers.

TheMultiliteracies Wiki has a wealth of resources and ideas for integrating digital technologies into teaching. Developed by teachers, the focus of this resource is on the meaningful application of technology in teaching and learning.

The Ad Lit Book Club, an initiative of the Center for Adolescent Literacies at UNC Charlotte in Charlotte, N.C. to build community and conversation around discussions of books that focus on adolescents and their literacies. Durng the Summer 2015, we will read and discuss It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens by danah boyd.

The Center is a partner in the First 3 Beginning Teacher Support Program developed by the Omicron Pi chapter of Kappa Delta Pi at UNC Charlotte. This program provides professional development and mentoring to teachers during their first three years of teaching.

Who we are...

Follow this link for information about the Center, its faculty team, and to download copies of our annual reports and newsletters.